This is a dry run for some ideas about the use of visual irony in picture books for young children that I’m going to incorporate into a lecture for the course on Children’s Literature that I’ve started teaching this semester. My starting point is Chu’s Day, a picture book written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Adam Rex, that was published earlier this year. I bought a copy for my own children and demand was such that for a few days it became regular reading as a bedtime story in our house.
The book tells the story of a young panda, Chu. In the first half of the book he visits a library and then a diner with one of his parents. His parents fear that he is going to sneeze, but he doesn’t. In the second half of the book Chu goes to the circus with both parents who become so absorbed in the spectacle that they fail to notice that he is about to sneeze. When he does sneeze it brings the whole circus down. At the close of the book, Chu declares that was ‘a sneeze all right’, as he is put to bed.
(My son enjoying a panda sneeze.)
Like many picture books and stories for young children, Chu's Day depends upon various kinds of repetition: when Chu sneezes, for example, the devastating effects are shown upon the diner and the library that he had visited in the first half of the book. But the whole book hinges upon a repetition (the non-sneezes), followed by breaking that repetition (the devastating sneeze). Another well-known example of this effect in a children's book, would be The Gruffalo: after scaring each would-be predator, the mouse laughs ‘there’s no such thing as a Gruffalo’, but this becomes ‘There’s no such thing as the Gruffal-Oh!’ on the third repetition, with the appearance of the Gruffalo himself.
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| O help O no it's a Gruffalo! |
My children very much enjoyed the humour of this variation in a repetition, and the play upon expectations in the first half of the book. They loved the way that Chu fails to sneeze - a full page of Chu about to sneeze (‘aah … aaah … aaaah’) followed by Chu on a single page with a curt ‘no’. My daughter was especially taken with this - although she loved soundscape of the book as whole, and started anticipating expletives (‘oops’ and ‘yup’) after only one reading of the book. I have a theory that the break with expectations (‘aah … aaah … aaah … No!’) was a rehearsal for her of a kind of agency that children don’t often enjoy in their relationships with adults. Parents spend a lot of time setting limits, so the vicarious enjoyment of Chu’s ‘no’ becomes a chance to participate in a refusal of adult expectations without consequences. Well, it’s a theory.
Like all good children's books there's a lovely interaction between the material rhythms of language in the text and the detail of the illustrations. Adam Rex alternates between pages where background details are carefully excluded and lush full-page spreads (of the diner, the library and the circus). But the detail I’m most interested in is a small one: on nearly every page of the book, there is a snail. He (?snails are hermaphrodites, I think?) plays no roll in the narrative and appears most prominently on one of the final pages, where s/he is sitting on the Daddy Panda’s hat as Chu’s parents put him to bed, reproduced here.*
My children spotted the snail very quickly on that page, then took delight in pointing him/her out on the previous pages on subsequent readings. The snail belongs to a form of visual irony that I’ve started to associate with picture books for children. Over and over again, in reading picture books with my children, I’ve begun noting small visual details of this kind that push the images beyond the simple rendering in pictorial terms of a text. Sometimes these details are extraneous to the plot (think of the numerous onlooking animals in Axel Scheffler’s picture books); sometimes such details become the plot: in Shirley Hughes’ Alfie Lends a Hand, for example, the central character takes steps to resolve the central dilemma two pages before they are described in the text (this is going to be the starting point for my lecture).
My theory is that the appeal of such details lies in the sense they give of narrative plenitude - they intimate a world in such picture books beyond the text and beyond the central narrative. But the pleasure may also lie in an associated form of agency (again): the child reading the book becomes active in creating a story that is not necessarily dictated by the text. But - heaven knows whether or not I'm right - it's just a theory. I’m pretty innocent of critical writing about picture books at the moment (there’s still 3 weeks before I have to formalise this in a lecture). All I know for sure right know is that my children enjoy the books.
* Rather than violate anyone’s copyright, I’ve sketched a version of part of this scene. That's the snail in the top right, above the snazzy hat the Daddy panda wears. The book (which I clearly recommend) is readily available to purchase if you want to see it for yourself.
Epilogue and Update
Since drafting this, I've discovered a blog post by Neil Gaiman about the book's genesis: I've been reading his stuff since I was 16 and drew the picture below (in effect, an embarrassing piece of fan art) sometime last year in response to a comment somewhere about his ‘crazy hair’ (the subject of another picture book by Gaiman I’ve yet to read). If I get a chance, I’ll write up my son’s response to yet another of his books Fortunately the Milk - a different and involved story, with space cats.
